I have sent an email to the Oracle address above with my situation concerning future of SAP&Oracle on Itanium/HP-UX. But I have to say something more about this, additionally: the Scottish tiger went wild ;( as we see... However I was glad to see Oracle making the acquisition of Sun (if anyone ever had to do that), now it starts to behave too much like Micro$oft, but I think all this is also very much HP's responsibility !

Reaction was supposed to take place at least 3-4 years ago when Fedora project announced it will leave Itanium platform - maybe they were asking for attention from a companies like HP and Oracle who invested so much in Open Source (not so much in Red Hat as a company and as a matter of perspective) - maybe they didn't ask much (I am not sure) ? I've tried to alarm on discussion lists and appropriate addresses about this at the time, but nobody wanted to listen to someone speaking about the long-term business benefits - or worse, about non-calculated and non-cold thoughts for the benefit of the community ...

We truly appreciate you taking the time to express your concerns to Oracle, and here on the blog. HP leadership is very engaged, fighting hard for our customers. We have noted your concerns on this and other posts and are in communication with the team to address your concerns. Thank you for speaking out.

I have received response from Oracle about RDBMS 12g desupport on Itanium which quite disturbing - future SAP Netweaver release support relies on RDBMS version, so THIS IS A BIG ISSUE ! Oracle account team can only suggest us to move to another hardware, and this is a big financial fail for us now - we plan to remain on existing hardware and we are planning Itanium BladeServer purchase as part of the strategy for next 5-10 years !!! Here is the mail response (and my question) bellow:

Hello Zoran. Indeed, 12g will not be available on Itanium-based HP servers. I would like to suggest you meet with your Oracle account team to explore all possible options you may have given these circumstances.

Hello, Jeb, as given in my example situation, what will happen with support for Oracle 12g on Itanium ?Specially, if SAP Support demands in future (which is more than likely as part of regular SAP release strategy !) to move to Oracle 12g, what options do we have ? If your answer is that Oracle 12g will not be supported on Itanium, me and my company are getting into a big trouble. Moreover, it would be more tha! n likely that our management would then decide to move from both Oracle and HP very soon !!! You see, we can not wait 5 or more for our existing hardware to get outdated and replaced, as we already are in the middle of several implementation projects, and changing or mixing hardware and OS/DB platforms is an unjustified risk and is now already completely out of any question. My company has chosen HP Integrity (and AlphaServer before it) and Oracle many years ago (15 or so, even before SAP we were completely Oracle based !) as part of a strategy which offers platform independence, and now there is a possibility that Oracle's decision to desupport Itanium in future might introduce heavy hardware roadmap changes and migration costs which will lower promised ROI and devastate our already fragile IT investment plans. I hope there is still space to reverse Oracle's decision or to find a more appropriate remedy than currently given. Regards,Senior System Engineermr Zoran Popovic, Certified SAP ProfessionalSAP BC, Hemofarm a.d. STADAzoran.popovic@hemofarm.comhttp://www.hemofarm.com

I have opened message to Oracle and SAP support about this situation - shortly, Oracle advised us we should consider talking to our local Oracle account team, while SAP stated that this is actually a consulting issue and not a support issue. I suppose what king of answer we can get from HP. If we do not plan to upgrade our SAP systems up to 2018 we can rely on SAP's and Oracle's extended support, and that's it - normally, major SAP Netweaver release upgrades on the customer side should be planned at least every 3-5 years max. And my company, as an HP customer, has to decide if we should invest now in Itanium hardware which might become a seriously ill business bottleneck in next 3-5 years. Not a good situation at all, and I suppose that every SAP customer on Itanium feels the same (I do believe it is not an insignificant community). Regards,